


Grasping at Stars

by bluebloodbruise



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Bipolar Ian, Canon Compliant, M/M, Slurs, until 5x12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-05 02:13:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5357087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebloodbruise/pseuds/bluebloodbruise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian and Mickey run into each other four years later.</p><p>Four chapters, each from a character's POV: first Mickey, then Ian, and then Mandy. The fourth is an epilogue with both Mickey's and Ian's POV. </p><p> </p><p>This is my piece of closure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Last First Moment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pink_ink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pink_ink/gifts).



> Hi everyone. This is my way of saying "thank you" for all your amazing free labor. I have been a silent reader for months now, occasionally commenting on your work under a different handler. I wanted to give something back to this talented community, while finding my own closure with characters I came to love but that have been mangled beyond repair by canon. So that’s what this is. Maybe after I am done I can rest in peace.
> 
> I finally learned how to dedicate this to my beloved pink_ink! 
> 
> The title is a spin on the saying “grasping at straws”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It all flashes hot behind his eyelids, all these possible combinations of words as of reactions. Memories too, splintering and skyrocketing like shooting stars, peopling the blackness behind his furrowed brow, his scrunched eyes, that foreshadowed headache finally entering his sight, hitting him hard. He finds anger and resentment still shimmering in that cascade of darkness, in that vault of old images. Dead light my ass. It stings like raw fire, cigarette butts put out on your arm. It rains on you and it rains on you and it never stops whaling. It never stops peeling your skin off. It never stops hurting. Time does no healing. Fuck. Fuck those science textbooks and weepy self-help manuals he took out the prison library one day. Damn them all to hell and back."

That the stars are dead light never ceases to take him aback. Since he read that in one of his GED books—maybe some two odd years ago—he can’t gaze up at the sky in the same way. He could see them up there now, pricks of light glimmering through the thick evening fog and, once again, he can’t help but wonder if it hurt, if it hurt to go out in such a spectacular fashion, to blow up amidst particles of dust, to be hurled through the grime mucking the universe from such a mighty height. Hell—he thought taking another swig of his drink, leaning more fully against the abandoned doorframe, breathing in the smoggy city air—hell, if he didn’t known all about crashing down in a blaze of smoke, tumbling down into the dirt, scraping fingers and knuckles and soft tissue along the ragged, long way down. Images of locked doors and iron windows, the pinching crampedness of bunk beds and the high-pitched, everlasting, ever-present ugly noises of small confinement, the stench of too many bodies pressed together in moldy bathrooms and smoke-stained cells. It was a pain and a memory, projected across time, but there nonetheless. Like the light from the stars—it may be dead but you still can’t outrun it. He doesn’t even try anymore. He comes here in the small hours of the morning, after day-long shifts and week-long drives back and forth the Midwestern plaines, sips from a cold can and lets it all drain away, all the random facts, all the inane chitchat, the sounds of bullets wheezing in the air, the warmth of hands on his solar plexus, of fingers on his lips. Sometimes all these memories taste wrong, bloody and stale. Other times they are reassuring, breadcrumbs like discarded casings, trailing the places where he has been, the things he has seen. Dead light. It can’t hurt him anymore. 

He sighs. His drink has gone warm. The wind has grown cold. He has become soft. Late autumn in Chicago kisses you in the face to kick you in the groin. What to do but keep on putting on coats to discard them later, to put them back on again once the sun sinks down and the stars come up. He thinks this is what his life feels like sometimes, even outside a five by five cubicle, even while driving through the sprawling fields, forests, creeks, mountains dotting Illinois to Montana. He feels confined by the outline of unresolved memories, the parameters of familiar places, the void of once-beloved shapes, all beckoning you over and over again, regardless of how far you go, how fast you run, you still cannot avoid going back. To your childhood home, to your old haunts, your old bad habits. 

Damn. All this waxing philosophically because he needs a smoke and is trying to wiggle himself out of the craving. He gives up, the same quiet, abrupt way he’s given up on so many other things recently—fighting, dealing, using, shooting things up, feeling much of this or that. He used to feel a lot, all the time, all of a sudden—rage and powerlessness and frustration and fear. And love, maybe. Maybe that too but it’s hard to tell now. His memory of love is blurry, the kind of photograph you thumb so often it fades into the point of non-recognition. So maybe. Maybe once or twice.

Reaching for his shirt pocket he pulls out a cigarette, lights it up deliberately and breathes in deep, staring at the crumbling target practice set up under the metal structure, the shudder of the train sending light into dark patches littered with debris and scurrying homeless bodies. In the distance, a man runs away, fast, faster, as if his life depended on it. A stray dog barks. Home sweet home. Man, isn’t it grand? The way it subtly changes but it does not really change at all. Different winos, different bullies, different angry kids with guns, but still the same—the same smoky smell, the same rundown houses, the same booze, the same bruises. Damn. Change the players but keep playing the same moves expecting different outcomes—that’s the definition of madness, right? Nah, he has seen madness before. He knows he isn’t mad, just tired. Too many days on the road without any real sleep. That will make you soft. That will make you loopy, lenient to ramble and reminisce, but it won’t make you crazy. Crazy is something else altogether. It’s lying in bed believing you’re drowning. It’s clawing your nails at the windowpane trying to prey it open. It’s trying to love sickness away. 

It’s past eight when he peels himself away from the shambled doorway, takes the first step down to the street preparing to walk the five blocks back home. He stops to let the running man speed by, punching out without halting his punishing pace: “Hey Mick.” He doesn’t greet the man back but briefly nods, lifting his empty can in mock salutation. His smoke is near the end, but he keeps pulling on it, feeling a headache coming, or maybe the memory of how a headache comes about. He doesn’t move although he is getting uncomfortably cold. Instead he hangs his head low, massages his temples, keeps his eyes closed trying to will the pain to turn back, to go away. It’s the sound of heavy breathing and shifting feet on the pavement that makes him finally look up. Doubled-over, the man gasps for air, his neck splashed red, his hands veiny and swollen, holding his hips, keeping him steady. Always an overachiever, that’s the first thought that enters his mind, that and that the man’s red hair has grown long again. But no, that’s wrong. It was this long the last time I saw him. Maybe that’s it, maybe he never cut it. Or maybe I am remembering him instead of seeing him. That would explain why he has made no attempt to move, no attempt to talk. Maybe he’s not real. A shake of the head, a squint of the eyes, and he’ll go away again. Not forever, but you know, dead light. It cannot hurt you.

A look of confusion floats over the redhead’s face as he stands up and takes one step forward. He looks taller, leaner, his face jagged and taut. There’s a faint hint of stubble. His eyes are glassy like when he used to work himself too hard or mix new pills. Oh that doesn’t look good. A memory doesn’t age. A memory doesn’t get baby-fat sucked out of it, doesn’t grow tired around the eyes. “Hey” the man repeats, his voice hoarse, “hey.” It’s the strangest thing. His voice sounds the same, just drier, as if he had not used it enough these last few years, like he speaks too low or too little. Mickey nods, what else can you do when you start seeing things? You nod to the ghosts. You let them know you come in peace. You let them know you don’t believe they are real. 

“You been here long?” Mickey hears the question and looks up to the stars, trying to calculate how much time has passed between sundown and now. Maybe two hours? Eight months? Five light years? Who knows? That’s not the question being asked anyway, he realizes maybe a bit too late. So he finds himself saying, “Yeah.” Which is true—he’s been under that derelict overpass, that foggy Chicago sky for a long time, since he was born really, if you come to think of it.

The redhead tilts his head enigmatically, his hands still squarely on his hips. Man, can that fucker get any taller? How old is he now? Twenty-two maybe? You can’t keep growing at that age, right? Nah, he can’t be taller. I’m seeing things, I’m seeing things, his blood drums in his temples painfully, although he might be smiling, he might feel this hard edge of a smile creeping on his lips and he realizes he’s smiling because he’s nervous. No, he’s underslept. No, not that either. Inhaling sharply the redhead had come to sit down on the first step of the walkup. That’s two steps away from Mickey’s body. He shifts his weight, climbs another step, finds the rotten door behind him. 

“Can I bum one?” he inquires gently, gesturing behind his head without turning around. Mickey thinks he sees disappointment flicker in the man’s face when he pulls two cigarette, lights them, and leans one down. The redhead accepts it though, shivers when he closes his eyes and sucks the smoke in. From the top of the stairs, Mickey can see that the man’s hair is unevenly cut, and there’s ash, burnt specks on the top tips. Like he ran through a fire. Like he touched a bursting star. 

There is no silence. Blaring alarms, screaming children, screeching tires, crackling sounds that might be bullets, sirens, firecrackers, all float from a distance. Amidst all this there’s the humming of thoughts and Mickey can sense—knows—that soon they’ll be talking, whether he particularly feels like it or not, they’ll be talking again. He remembers talking, but mostly he remembers pursing his lips shut because there was safety in silence and pain in words. So he remains mum and when Ian is talking Mickey continues to gaze into the direction of safer noises, car honks and stray bullets.

“Didn’t know you were back home. I mean, I don’t come here often. I live in Hyde Park now. You know, on the other side of the I-90? With Lip. I mean, Lip teaches at U of C, I work around there.” A pause. Nothing. A sigh. Again. “But Debbie, she’s still here.” The waving of a hand, drawing a large circle in the air. “In the house, I mean. She has a couple of kids. Vee helps. They help, you know? With the daycare, with all the kids.” He’s tired, I can tell. It’s in the way he can’t keep the energy going to finish a sentence. It’s in the way he tells this story like a script he rehearses every night before going to bed and again when he gets up in the morning. He sounds normal. He looks well-adjusted. He must be hurting still. He just got better at hiding it. 

“Mandy, is she here?” Ian asks abruptly, as if suddenly regaining the hang of social pleasantries. “It’s just that...well, I am out of touch with, you know...”

Mickey exhales, “Yeah,” agreeing to it all—to Ian’s remoteness, to his ignorance, to their distance, to Mandy being back home, in her old room, probably sleeping before her night shift at Sizzlers on West 46th. 

“No more Kenyatta then? She finally dumped him?”

Mickey chuckles, a reflex propelled by a not-so-funny recollection of sticky fingers in the Indiana heat, fumbling in the dark, struggling to drag a heavy rolled-up tarp into a car trunk, knocking its feet on the taillight and laughing maniacally, Mandy and him, almost dropping the impossible load in their fit, the lump wet against their drenched shirts, laughing with the heady thought of freedom, of danger, of finding a marsh deep enough to swallow up their past, their bruises, this six-feet-tall body, big enough to put distance between them and that moment in time. Light years, a black hole, one universe.

“Yeah, you can say that.” He steps on his cigarette. Silence grows ominous, heavier, like smoke rapidly filling up a burning house. 

“You back here too?” The same circular motion, the long hand and red-lit cigarette swirling in the air.

“Yep. Back at the ole family homestead.”

That made the redhead’s eyes widen and his head whiplashes backwards, facing him head-on for the first time yet. The first time in what? Thirty-three months? Nah, five years? No. A lifetime. Another time.

“But, what about your dad? Is he, you know...”

“Bashing fagots and kid-fuckers? Yeah, probably. Probably doing it right now. He took his bat when he left last time. But then again, he might be in jail. Or dead in some ditch. Who knows?” His fingers itch for another cigarette but he grits his teeth, clenches his fists, attempts to deny the rousing desire. Instead he goes back to the Indiana memory with Mandy, switches around some details, renames the lump in the trunk. It’s good, it is all good. 

“So did he... Shit, weren’t you afraid?”

Mickey is surprised by his own billowing laughter, unfettered, raw, a tad too high-pitched. Did he miss this? Did he? No. He still laughs. He laughs all the time with his sister, over a beer and an order of fries, in dive bars scattered across the interstate, with burly strangers in god-forgotten rest-stops. But this was laughing with ghosts, about ghosts, about himself before he went all starry-eyed and imploded. It wasn’t humorous, pleasurable laughter. It was metallic-tasting, like blood or cinders.

“Ian, come on. It was over after that night. After he knew, that was it. I had a gun, I had you, I was set. I was safe.” Seeing the uncomfortable shift in the other man’s body, the way he turns around to face the dark streets, Mickey swallows, opens and closes his hands, tries to make it simpler. “Listen, you were gone but I still had the gun. I shot him the next time he came barging into Mandy’s room. He never came back after that.” 

Ian’s lips form a single syllable, dangling there low and ripe, “Oh.” Yeah, Mickey thinks, yeah that’s me, a thug. Gun-totting. That’s it. Keep on keeping on. That’s the thing with memories, constellations, ghosts–you can’t change them no matter how hard you try. They are fixed. They always run the same course, the same script, inured to the possibility of change. 

Suddenly gripped by a wave of irritation he pushes off the doorway, letting go of his veiled protection. Fuck that. He is alive. He’s come far, far away, he has changed. He has changed. Prison changes you. A GED changes you. Time changes you. He is moving forward. No more gazing at dead light. 

He surges forward, ready to slay the dragon, spit some magical incantation to make the phantom go back to the grave, back to the trunk, back to the closet. The redhead seems lost in thought, the cigarette crumbling in his fingers, immobile, unsmoked. If he noticed Mickey’s abrupt movement, he didn’t show it. 

“I’m better,” he hiccups without looking up. “I am firefighter. Well, on a trial basis, but still.” A beat, a breath. “And you? How are you?”

Mickey marvels at the absolute awkwardness of that statement, at the absurd anachronism of their present situation. He tries to remember the last time he slept outside of a truck, full-on horizontally, and he estimates that maybe it has been a week, maybe two. Damn, that long huh? Time slips by. 

“Jeez Ian, I’m dandy,” he finally replies with a touch of rudeness, plain old impatience for trite social banter. “I’m sober, I’m working. I’m still trying to quit smoking.” He grins at the accidental rhyme, then adds without much thought, “I’m out.” Then again, deliberately, letting the meaning linger there, in the dead space between them, “I’m out.”

“How long again?” Ian asks, remotely, curiosity far removed from his voice. Mickey shifts slightly, almost regrets loading his words with meaning. Maybe the pills make him thicker, still slow him down? Maybe the adult Ian is now can only think in literals. It doesn’t matter though, does it? Not anymore. It’s too late.

“Thirty-three glorious fucking months at the mercy of Cook County,” he scoffs dryly but not without humor. “Fraud you know? In the end. Nothing flashy, just credit-card and moving-trucks fraud. Which is funny because I drive trucks for a fucking living now. Isn’t that ironic?”

That last word seemed to get Ian’s attention. He turns to face Mickey again, looking upwards, his eyes large and bewildered, twitching ever so slightly at the corners. A side-effect maybe? You should get that checked out, Mickey thinks, only to dismiss the idea with a head shake. Those eyes, damn they are still lovely, but seem empty a bit, murky maybe? Like seeing through a glass darkly. There is a crack in there. Yeah, if he stretched his fingers he could touch that red hair and he would feel it then, buried under soft skull and curls—the crack inside Ian’s brain. Mickey is suddenly filled with bitter fury, a shadow passing through his insides. His cheeks burn, his fists stiffen. Maybe he hasn’t changed all that much after all.

“I know what irony is, if that’s what you’re gawking at! I am not the same piece of Southside trash you met years ago! I went to school! Mandy went to school! We got fucking diplomas, alright?! So you can wipe that smug look from your face, asshole.”

“I am not...no, I mean, not what...” Ian stammers haphazardly, shaking his head slowly, moving his eyes away. “I am sorry.” He folds his hands on his lap and Mickey finally notices that he is wearing a uniform of some kind. Blue, too big for his lanky body, a name tag on his chest. Different from his ROTC uniform and yet so very much the same. 

“Sure you are,” he spits, shaking his Mountain Dew can. Empty, right, forgot. 

“No, really. I am. I love you.”

The sound that came out of his throat resembles a strangled cough, the marriage of a grimace and a chortle. It all flashes hot behind his eyelids, all these possible combinations of words as of reactions. Memories too, splintering and skyrocketing like shooting stars, peopling the blackness behind his furrowed brow, his scrunched eyes, that foreshadowed headache finally entering his sight, hitting him hard. He finds anger and resentment still shimmering in that cascade of darkness, in that vault of old images. Dead light my ass. It stings like raw fire, cigarette butts put out on your arm. It rains on you and it rains on you and it never stops whaling. It never stops peeling your skin off. It never stops hurting. Time does no healing. Fuck. Fuck those science textbooks and weepy self-help manuals he took out the prison library one day. Damn them all to hell and back.

“What? You don’t believe me?” The voice has an edge of anger—or is it defiance—to it. The voice of an older memory, an even younger self.

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Strangely the tumult in his brain doesn’t come out in his voice. Mickey has perfected the art of keeping quiet—planted in his childhood and imperative in his teen years—over those precarious thirty-three months, when fear made everything tentative, and breakable, and small. Before he knows it, he is sitting on one of the steps, a foot away from Ian. The strained silence is making the redhead uncomfortable, but you can only tell if you look closely at the way he taps his left foot on the gravel and pushes his chin away, to the right. His hair is indeed too long, like an afterthought, like time caught up with him too, like he is left jogging after lost hours, lost dreams. There’s patches of grease and dirt on his cuffs. His hands are too pale but roughed up, fingernails bitten to the quick, scarred tissue on his knuckles. 

Without thinking, Mickey stretches his fingers and tugs a fallen strand of red hair behind Ian’s ear. The skin on the small of his neck is oddly warm and clammy. Feverish even. Mickey doesn’t linger but Ian responds to the gesture by repeating, barely above a whisper, “I love you.” And the way he says it is familiar, the same light, confident tone you’d use to vow “see you later” to a child. For a split second Mickey thinks of telling Ian that he doesn’t have one of those anymore, that his son turned out to be his brother and that he moved away years ago. But he refrains from intimacy, from nurturing any kind of ember better left defunct. Instead he replies, simply, to his own surprise but not to his displeasure, “I loved you too.”

That they were sitting there on borrowed time, both too tired to move, it had become obvious an hour ago. Still when Ian got to his feet, Mickey found himself surprised by the movement. He said nothing. He felt vaguely colder now that Ian’s body was not there to shelter him from the vicious Chicago wind. Ian walks into the street, looks ahead as if ready to go. But then he steps back into the walkup, clears his throat, his face flustered by some quizzical resolution. He sounds prideful, almost defiant, when he asks, “Do you want to come back to my place?” As if wanting to make his intentions completely clear he tags on, “To fuck or something.”

Mickey finds that his lips flinch, warding off a cigarette as much as a smile. His throat is dry but his mind is clear. Somehow saying those words have made him feel clean, uncluttered, like a room after spring cleaning, a forest after a wild fire. 

“Nah, thanks man, I’m good,” he chuckles and he means it. He’s good. He’s not trash anymore, he’s not bad nor broken. He’s good. Mickey can immediately intuit the change in Ian’s body, a drooping of the shoulders, the letting go of a stalled breath, both which can mean disappointment as much as relief. Maybe his pills are still screwing with him. Maybe that was a proposition he couldn’t really follow through. Maybe he is lonely. Yeah, Mickey suddenly understands, looking away, up into the skies, feeling a little jab of something still simmering in his gut. Yeah, he’s lonely in a world of normal, well-adjusted people. Nobody knows him. Nobody reaches in. He is as alone as one of those stars up there. 

When he glances back at the street, the redhead is gone. If he had taken off running, Mickey couldn’t say. He hadn’t heard him go but, then again, he had been blinded by the searing headache that had roared back in with a vengeance after an illusory truce. Man, he needs a drink. Mandy might have bought some of that disgusting nonalcoholic beer he swore himself to after drying up in jail. Maybe if he hurries he can still catch his sister before she has to clock in at Sizzlers. Maybe they can sit on the porch and have a beer, gazing up at the stars, huddled in winter coats, saying nothing at all about the dark corners that dead light still didn’t manage to clear out. Maybe. Maybe if he runs it’s not too late, he can still make it.


	2. Ian Gallagher Prefers to Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I kept having Ian's voice spinning in my head so I thought I'd write his side of the story. Whenever you think you are done with something, they come back to haunt you (true story).
> 
> Thank you for reading, as always. Less sad this time, I think, for what is worth*
> 
> "But this, this makes him take pause. It's a smell like cigarettes and he misses that smell so much that he doesn’t start running right away. He is immobilized by the weight of how much he misses it, the smell of—what? Nostalgia? Bitterness? Or is it something else? (home) He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care to know right now. His head is suddenly foggy. He blames the half antidepressant he chew earlier, as an afterthought, two days gone without any pills. He can feel his hands shaking, his body starting to warm all over, damp still from the rain. So he sits with his back to the dark-haired man as a way to conceal the flush rushing to his cheeks, making him feel clumsy and queasy. 'Come here, come here, please come here' the pores in his skin scream, but he doubts Mick can hear it. If he could, he would have to touch him. After that, Ian doesn’t know what he would do, if he would burn up, punch him down, or just cry. (Fuck, I bet I’d cry)."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PS. The show is so notorious for fabricating addresses that I am going with my experience of Chicago when describing geography.

When people ask, he invariably replies that he prefers to run. The question is irrelevant: from a casual invitation for drinks to a sisterly request for dinner, from workplace chitchat to post-coital pillow-talk, his answer remains fixed, grounded, bolted down to that one absolute truth: when given the option, Ian prefers to run. In the morning before work, at night between shifts, in the sultry heat and snowy cold, Ian runs fast, faster, until his bones grind and his muscles sting and his mind is flooded by the sweet sensation of nothingness, of being entirely bodily and blissfully absent at the same time. 

It seemed to start innocently enough. As a kid, dreaming of the army, he ran in makeshift circuits on top of abandoned buildings, on dirty alleyways, around the yard. He ran to build muscle and speed, to ward off the bullies lurking in living rooms and school hallways. So he ran all the way out of his teens, trying to stimulate an extra growth spurt, force tendons to make himself tougher, faster, braver, a force to be reckoned with. The force that he found, in the end—the force he still can’t reckon with—is his mind. It’s the Fall after his twenty-second birthday when he realizes this. He is running in the pouring rain and his heart suddenly aches. Not like when you overwork your body, but when you see a stranger touch someone’s face on the street and you know they are loved. A needling pain, dull and familiar, catching up with you after years of lying dormant. A pain you forgot you were able to feel. Ian’s relentless pace slows down to a halt, and he is left doubled-over on the soggy ground, his knees scuffed, his hair soaking wet. He can’t tell where he is, he can’t tell if he is crying—the pounding rain and the falling night make it all too impossibly confusing.

For the first years away from home and on medication, Ian soothed his attachment to running by describing it as a “preference,” a coping mechanism, a healthy hobby, and later a necessary component of his new vocation. He explained this to his siblings, coworkers, employers, doctors, one-night-standers, bystanders, and strangers—in that precise order. To them he stressed that running was not a side-effect of manic behavior nor an indication of an upcoming episode. To himself he murmured that running was not a symptom of a larger personality flaw, a sign of inconstancy or unavailability—of most dreaded cowardliness. Instead of smoking, he jogged. Instead of drinking, he sprinted. In the long hours after the university locked its gates and before the bars filled with attractive prospects, he ran by Lake Michigan. Right before dawn, when his fingers felt the edges of his bed grow wider, he ran on campus. On birthday parties and Christmas mornings, when the sound of laughing children and flirty strangers closed in around him, he ran around the block. When his mind was flooded by memories he couldn’t untangle, smells, and sensations, and smiles—all the time, all the fucking time now—he ran anywhere. In-between jobs, in-between fires, in-between neighborhoods and in-between fucks, he jogged, he sprinted, he darted all the while repeating to himself: “This is what I do.This is what I like. I, Ian Gallagher, prefer to run.” 

In that November dusk, Ian finally accepts that something has changed. He runs still, as diligently and aggressively as he can, through clouds of pinging anxiety and leadened limbs, he sprints through miles and miles of asphalt and yet, he is not moving forward. His body, grown to full height at twenty-two, can’t find any more skin to fill in, no more room for bulk and muscle. After finishing high school, Ian dabbled at college classes under his brother’s advisement, but he simply could not focus. His mind had curled up into itself, a shriveled lung caught in the grasp of an iron fist. The pills gave him a handy excuse but it wasn’t that, not really. No. He just couldn’t outrun the darkness unfolding inside him; it was like attempting to outrun his shadow—it only drove him madder. 

The truth is he is erratic with his meds—has been for weeks now. He is tired of being tired. Once or twice he wanted to talk to Lip about it while they ran side-by-side on the treadmill in the university gym. He planned to talk to his therapist, thought of talking to the boy he cleans classrooms with, or the other boy he has been sleeping (but not running) with. Every time he forms the words in his head they evaporate, a halo of fear burning them out of his mind. Ian comes to the conclusion, in the rainy wasteland, with his head hanging between his legs, that he is somewhat afraid of everyone he knows and even more scared of the people that have yet to meet him. He hopes it’s a small number; he hopes no one will look inside; he hopes he won’t die alone; he fears he might. 

Darkness sneaks in but Ian knows where he is. His running patterns, mirroring that of his mind, often take him in circles. From Hyde Park on East 54th & Harper where he currently lives with Lip on a university-owned brownstone, he jogs all the way through West Garfield and down South Racine to his old home where Debbie still lives with her two kids. He finds himself here too often this past year, connecting the dots between his past and present life through six miles of familiar street names and remodeled real estate. He seldom visits his sister but the familiarity of the surroundings make him feel safer, even if the cacophony of sirens, firecrackers, and thumping music should have made him feel otherwise. Hyde Park, cloistering the ever-impressive moneyed dome of privileged academics, suffocates him, but he only realized this when he started running on _his_ side of South Side Chicago, and let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding in for over two years. Fuck, home is where your feet take you when you are not thinking, when your heart is at the wheel. Ian believes in this. He doesn’t believe in much these days.

Perhaps it is because he feels so at ease in his homegrown turf that it takes Ian a beat to reduce his speeding pace. He is unsure of this, although he knows he will overplay the moment in his mind. He is running steadily again under the overpass, oblivious to all but his thundering heartbeat, when his step stutters and everything changes—the quality of the air, the density of the oxygen, the temperature of the wind. It got sharper, thicker, colder all at the same time. The hairs behind his neck stand up, tingling, as if someone just walked over his grave. Ian senses all this before he even recognizes him. Before recognizing him, however, he is already saying "Hey Mick." (Is that how this goes? I mean, did it happen like this before? Did I fall for him before I even cussed him out, before we even really looked at each other? Fuck. No. No. It’s not that easy. No, it’s not that hard.)

It is the smell that makes Ian sit down. It has been years since anything stops him in his tracks. Men come and go, but Ian never slows down enough to catch their full names, their life stories. They chase him, he lets himself be caught, picks up and takes off a day, a week, a month later. But this, this makes him take pause. It's a smell like cigarettes and he misses that smell so much that he doesn’t start running right away. He is immobilized by the weight of how much he misses it, the smell of —what? Nostalgia? Bitterness? Or is it something else? (home) He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care to know right now. His head is suddenly foggy. He blames the half antidepressant he chew earlier, as an afterthought, two days gone without any pills. He can feel his hands shaking, his body starting to warm all over, damp still from the rain. So he sits with his back to the dark-haired man as a way to conceal the flush rushing to his cheeks making him feel clumsy and queasy. “Come here, come here, please come here” the pores in his skin scream, but he doubts Mick can hear it. If he could, he would have to touch him. After that, Ian doesn’t know what he would do, if he would burn up, punch him down, or just cry. (Fuck, I bet I’d cry).

There’s a lot Ian can’t control—his illness reaffirms that all the fucking time—but he only grasps the depth of this reality when he is talking out loud and his voice is hoarse, his speech punctuated by uncertainty and stilted pauses, and it occurs to him that all of this is not from running, but from underuse. He had always been quiet as a kid, but something changed, that too, that too changed. He never talks anymore, not to his siblings, not to his therapist, not to his hookups. He exchanges information—practical, necessary—but he doesn’t shoot the breeze or over-share. (Which is funny because my mind is racing all the time, like an overworked fax machine spewing out a constant stream of asides, jokes, and snarky retorts). Still, he never talks. No, Ian prefers to run. 

Yet, here he is now, sitting in the middle of the night in some shady walk-up, asking inane questions, chatting away, saying more in ten minutes than he said in a year. It feels easy. Why does it feel easy when he can sense the palpable wave of hostility flung at him? (You know why).

Self-consciousness hits him hard and Ian falls silent, ashamed, vulnerable, a violent edge shaking him inside out. The cigarette dies in his hand; he forgot he can’t really stomach the taste anymore. The smoke inside his nostrils doesn’t smell the way it did at first, inviting, beloved. It’s stale now. Was this the smell he caught before, the one that stopped him in his tracks? (No.) Maybe? Ian tries to stay focused on the crumbling ash but all he can feel is his blood pounding in his temples and he is abruptly, painfully, aware of his dirty cuffs, of his ill-fitting janitorial uniform, of his sweaty unkempt hair. (Of all the days to run into him, it had to be tonight when I didn’t shower, I didn’t change, I didn’t shave. This shouldn’t matter but it does. I should be running but I am not. I should take those pills but I can’t. I shouldn’t be cleaning hallways but I am. I am. I am. I am what?)

“I’m better,” Ian blurts out, and suddenly he is telling Mick that he is a firefighter (well kind of, on a trail basis, which is stupid but it’s at least partially true, better than I am a fucking janitor at my brother’s school!), and he hates saying “U of C”, like he belongs there or goes there, instead of calling it by its proper name or some shitty monicker. No, he says “U of C” and he imagines Mick cringing under his breath because he, Ian Gallagher, is pathetic, a sad, sick high-school dropout, army reject, and firefighter-wannabe on an ugly-ass janitor’s uniform who can’t feel without hurting, nor hurt without hurting others back. 

Suddenly Mickey is screaming at him, flustered, his blue eyes lit up and hungry (does he read thoughts now?). Ian, however, can’t hear the words. He finally worked up the courage to blatantly stare and take him all in, the man Mick has become, hardened but somewhat better defined. Like a complete version of the skittish boy he once knew (oh). Strangely he resembles his sister more than before, which maybe is to be expected since Mandy was always the most solid person Ian ever met. He is relieved Mandy is alive, not beaten and buried in a ditch somewhere. He misses her. She knows him too. That’s rare nowadays. No one knows him anymore; he makes himself scarce. It sunders him to realize it but somehow their roles have been reversed. Ian Gallagher is in awe of Mickey Milkovich because somewhere along the great space-time continuum, Mickey moved forward while Ian stayed still. All that running and he has gone nowhere. (Shit, who would see that coming?)

Without warning, it hits him. (Man, this is it, isn't it? This is it, I know, I can tell). He will blame his wacky med regiment later (he thinks he might do that), but right there and then Ian sees with absolute clarity that this is how wanting, _really wanting_ , feels like. Messy, ugly, loud, and peeling hot. He had forgotten all about it. He realizes that his tiredness could be best explained by playing a ghost in his own life. But now here, sitting next to Mickey, he almost believes he has walked back in time; like if he strains enough he can hear his old self breathing through Mick’s nostrils, his mouth, his fingers. It’s a strong, healthier self and he wants him back. Oh he wants him back hard. If he could he would reach into Mick’s brain and pull out his recollection of a young, hopeful Ian and kiss it full on the mouth. (Why did I ever let him go? Because I could. Why didn’t I love him better? Because you couldn’t.)

And so Ian is saying it—to himself about himself, to the confident man about the scared boy—I love you. And he does, he loves him so much he wishes he could hold him in a deathlike grip until he becomes pressed into his skin, a permanent bruise, a blood-inked tattoo. Fuck. This is it. He is not going to be able to escape from this. (But I might as well try.) 

Something akin to terror grips Ian hard. It dawns on him that unlike anyone else that Ian knows or will ever know—his siblings, his therapist, his future lovers—Mickey holds the knowledge of him at an irretrievable crux: Ian’s peaks of promise and lows of failure. Mick’s mouth and memory are the keepers of both, forever. And for Ian, that right there, is the closest he will ever come of finding a home. He knows that saying “I love you” means little now because maybe Mick doesn’t love him anymore, doesn’t care to at any length, but somehow that doesn’t stop him. If anything, it makes Ian bolder, more defiant in his certainty. Once he loved the danger Mickey embodied, the foreignness of his detachment; now it’s the familiarity, the accessibility of memory, of common ground, that bind Ian to him. Did that mean he stopped loving him during the gap between now and then? Maybe. (I don’t know, I really don’t know). But then again, didn’t he stop knowing himself? (Yeah, I did, I did that too.) 

It pricks and burns when Mickey doesn’t say it back, when he tugs at his hair only to pull away, which takes Ian aback. For a moment he can feel the anger bubbling, his pride bristling, but for Ian that hurt is the closest to arousal, to intimacy, he has felt in years. He wishes he could bury his nose on the crook of that neck. His feet relax at the thought. If only Mick would stop pacing around and looked at him (really looked), he could tell him that. 

No, he can’t tell him that. He can’t tell him anything anymore. But maybe Mick can still hear it anyway, maybe he can pick up the unspoken words embedded between other trite, lewd ones. (Like sonar). Mickey could always tug at the wires in his brain and make him turn around, no matter what remote place Ian was in, he would follow the breadcrumbs and find his way back home. (Oh fuck, I’ve been leaving breadcrumbs all over the city for years now, haven’t I?). This time the breadcrumbs were sweat drops and muddy footprints from his worn-out running shoes. (Can you see them, Mick?) In a desperate attempt, Ian throws out there: “Do you want to come back to my place? To fuck or something?” 

These are not the right words, he knows, (they are impossible words actually), but they are the words that remind Ian of how he was before, before hesitant sentences and downcast eyes, before fearing to stop running and finding himself in a void, a stranger to himself. What these words really say is “Don’t let me go. Don’t let me go back there alone, Mick.” It’s the man’s mild laughter, the humming in his voice, loose, clean, carefree, that completely deflate Ian. (So this is it, he is over me. He is so over me he can’t even see me anymore, the real me, the one he could always find across a crowded room, a cocky laughter, a coked out stare. I knew it; it’s too late.) 

Ian can’t find anything inside him to throw back. He’s out of words, out of steam, out of excuses. Maybe out of time too. He walks to the sidewalk, glances ahead, and although he knows his surroundings by heart, he never felt at such a loss. (This is what happens when you lose sight of yourself, when all you can see is what you do not want to become: your mother, your father, a raving lunatic, a loser. You break things you don’t know how to fix. You become the things you fear. And then you run. What else can you do? You are chased by the ghosts of the things you killed.)

His feet are itching now. Mickey is quietly looking at the night sky and Ian wonders if he can ever let him go. Really forget him. He thought he could almost five years ago. The world was big and his will wild. But then his heart grew restless and his feet became homeless, and they started running laps around the city perimeter. He could never had gone far, Ian sees it now. He was just doing time in the hedged prison of his own making. (Oh fuck fuck fuck).

If Ian is lingering and staring is because he is playing a childish game of willing Mickey to stare back. If he does, then it means something, the universe is sending some kind of obscure message that Ian must decode, like stars forming constellations, secret geometric patterns he learned during his junior year when the army was still within reach. Ian wants to wait Mickey out, but before he knows it his feet have carried him away and he’s running hard, pounding fast against the pavement. He jogs for maybe ten minutes in a panic—his eyes closed, his fists clenched, half waiting to be hit by a car or struck by lightning (I gotta get out of here, I gotta get out, I can’t breathe, I can't breathe)—before he trips and falls headfirst in the sidewalk. He can feel the sprain in his ankle and the blood on his upper-lip before he rolls onto his back and looks up. 

It’s a full moon, a perfectly clear sky, rare for a heavily electrified city like Chicago. No wonder Mick couldn’t help gazing up. Right above his aching head, Ian devises the rough outline of a minor constellation. He smiles (it hurts), remembering tracing that constellation over and over again with an outstretched finger while lying in the damp baseball field one summer night, telling Mick about it, how the stars’ leaf-like shape resembled the birthmark on the older teen’s right hand. The boy Mickey was then had mocked the romantic Ian always was (but had forgotten). Still he had half-smiled when Ian called it the Mickey Way, an admittedly bad pun on the more famous stellar body. Then, in an unusual moment of surrender, Mickey had let Ian sketch the stars on his skin with tentative fingers, holding the birthmark under his lips for an instant too long. A lifetime ago.

Now, lying on the curb outside the Milkovich house, physically restrained from any more running, Ian decides to stop. Fear (or is it guilt?) drains out of him softly. He is reminded that the stars know him, that they never changed, even when he did. When he ran, they ran with him. When he spiraled out, they held their place right where he left them. Before he named them, they belonged to no one. Now they are his and they are Mick’s (even if he chooses to close his eyes) and that makes them somewhat eternal. In their constancy the stars reassure Ian that if he doesn’t hurry anymore, it’s not too late. His place is here, it’s always been there (inside), if only he stopped running (away, in circles). The simplicity of this thought snaps laughter inside him, laughter he didn’t know he still had, raucous and rueful. Defiantly, Ian hopes his laughter is loud enough to reach across time and space, to spread through the universe and his neighborhood, to wake up, not only sleepy boozers and stray dogs, but also ghosts—of those he killed and those he wants to live again. 

Let him come and find me, Ian thinks tasting blood on his throat and feeling the stars on his eyes, because I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere. Goddamn Mick Milkovich, I prefer you.


	3. The Noise of Things Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So remember when I said I was done with this? Well, I wasn't. 
> 
> After Mickey and Ian, I realized I could only get closure if I had Mandy too. So this is told through Mandy's eyes. As for a summary, picture this: Mandy & Mickey at Sizzler in a rainy night, talking about Ian. And life. And Tolstoy. And maybe Peter Pan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sizzler is still an active chain (notoriously in the West Coast) but it's been run out of Chicago for years now. There's one Sizzlers in the South Side, by Franklin, but honestly I wanted to have the dying steakhouse chain here so, yeah, Chicago purists, you've been duly warned :)
> 
> Also, you might have noted that somehow this turned into a series about the five senses. Mickey-sight; Ian-smell, and now Mandy-sound. Yeah, I know, I know. It's dorky. Lit. major forever.

Something died inside her when she was a little girl. Not as the result of a particular incident, which makes pinpointing it all the more difficult. She can’t say when it really happened; all she can do is feel the shape of absence echoing inside her, like when you move a piece of furniture out a room but the indentures in the carpet remain, reminding you of what was once there long after its form, its weight, are gone. There’s a ring to that feeling that is familiar to Mandy. She can hear it pinging off people’s mannerisms, their footsteps, the cadence in their voices. Off of buildings and knickknacks too. Jeez she hates vintage shops and antique stores, with all those chipped figurines, lonely mismatched earrings. They give her the creeps. 

She can hear it in this sad, dingy place the loudest. Once upon a time this joint was a hopping outpost of the great Sizzler steakhouse chain, where packs of all-American families (hers included) used to come for big birthday parties and Sunday suppers after Little League games. This is the last of those hundreds of restaurants dotted across the tri-state area. Once the paint finally peels off the walls and the frozen whipped cream melts off the day-old pies, no Sizzler will remain in Chicago. The cracked leathery booths will be plucked out, the foggy display case cast off, and a trendy coffee-shop will stand in its place. People will forget quickly. Judging by the faltering hum of the air-conditioner and the radio silence in the main room it must be up soon. 

Partially because it is so quiet inside, but also because Mandy is so attune to the particular sound of trouble, she is looking up from her ketchup bottles before the chime has sounded on the front door and her brother came bustling in. His hair is rummaged and his black coat is drenched like he ran all the way there in the pounding rain. He takes wide strides, not towards her, but to sit at his usual booth on the far corner, next to the broken jukebox. His clothes, black and wet, lend him a funeral aura, like he stepped out of another time, a specter lost between afterlives.  
She nods in his direction but doesn’t stop marrying her ketchups. There’s something about her brother, an unpredictable volubility and yet an inflexible fixedness, that have always made her keep her distance. It scares her, and she thinks it scares him too. Mickey makes her think of that "Peter Pan" line about fairies—that they can only feel one emotion at a time and always to its end, and for that reason their singular emotions are ferocious, overwhelming, and unremittable. She’s been witness to all of that, to her brother’s inability to experience mixed states or transfer affections. It’s something she grew to respect but can’t fully love. For the last year, Mickey has been rigidly committed to moving forward, to walk the straight and narrow. But tonight it’s one of those moments when Mandy can hear the change in the air, in the way he impatiently drums his foot on the floor and plays with the silverware on the table. 

So she says casually, attempting to camouflage that alarming sound with the sound of her own voice:

“Long night huh? I thought we were meeting back at home for dinner. What’s up?”

Her brother shrugs off the large winter coat, and replies, without moving his eyes from the table:

“Went for a walk, needed to stretch my legs. Thought I’d find you here.”

Mandy can hear the tiredness in his voice, heavy and real, but covering for something else. She decides to ignore that edge. 

“When was the last time you slept on a bed?”

Mickey seems to genuinely consider the question, counting with his fingers before giving up.

“Fuck knows. 2008?”

They snort. Its easy and comfortable for a few minutes until his tapping resumes. He stretches his arms on the table, opening his hands, lying his face on his wrists. He sighs, and it’s that sound that pushes Mandy farther away behind the counter. It is a hollow, sharp sound that always transports her to her favorite place in the world: 164 North State Street in downtown Chicago. People normally go there to sip expensive coffee and watch movies, but Mandy has been climbing up to the second floor of the Gene Siskell Film Center to gaze out of its wide windows for at least eight years. Across the street, there’s a ballet school that always keeps their blinds open, so everyone can see the girls in leotards and hair-buns repeat the same measured movements over and over again. Mandy goes there, not to see the ballerinas, but to hear them. It’s the sound of the pointe shoes hitting the wooden floor, that tap tap tap, snappy and angry and deliberate, that fills her with satisfaction. There’s nothing beautiful or delicate about it. It’s the sound of pain, of dedication, of hard work. She began hearing that sound after Terry bought her all these ballerina books as a child. Mandy did not enjoy the stories but Terry insisted on reading them to her before bed every night. So Mandy had to devise a way to drown out his smoky, raspy voice hovering all over her cheeks, her arms, her ears. Tap tap tap.

Mandy notices that her brother is talking in the distance. His voice, usually gruff, takes a softer pitch. She glances over and sees that Elf Face is fawning over him, a plastic straw hanging from her hand as she puts down a glass of Coke. The girl has it hard for Mickey, ever since he started coming in to spend the nights Mandy is working late. Mandy doesn’t know the name of the younger waitress, never cared to ask, but because of her pale, willowy figure and long red hair, the siblings call her Elf Face behind her back. Mandy thinks she looks like one of those puny princesses in fairytale books but Mickey is curiously gentle to her, trading jokes and accepting free refills, even leaving her unnecessarily generous tips (the girl can’t tell ketchup and hot sauce apart; enough said). Mandy is always surprised that her brother can be gentle, which she knows is somewhat unfair having seen him with Ian. It’s just that every time she needed him, Mickey had come through with brimstone and hellfire. That thought cues Mandy to the sound of bullets, of screeching tires, and barked orders in the hot Indiana summer, when they moved Kenyatta’s 200-pound body out of the house and into the stolen pickup’s trunk, driving without stopping for a whole night straight. She wonders if that’s how Mickey came up with the idea of being a long-distance truck driver. Tap tap tap.

Mandy shakes her mind off that memory and focuses back on Elf Face. She honestly cannot tell if her brother is nice to the girl because of her hair color, or because she is trying so hard. Mickey knows all about that. Since they were kids that she can hear Mickey’s brain twist and grind across rooms, through their adjacent walls, punching out ways to make life bearable. He is looking out of the window now, his black hair taunted and damp, and Mandy can tell there’s more to his night than what he is telling her. Normally she would not pry but it’s the sound of his breathing that frightens her. It’s ragged and syncopated like he is struggling to keep his heartbeat in check. 

“Yo dumbass, why didn’t you come home for dinner? I bought your gross beer, ya know that light shit?”

“Yeah. Well, I ran into someone.” Mickey’s voice is even but ominous. 

Involuntarily Mandy moves closer, abandoning the mayo jar on the counter. The noise of a booming voice echoing through the night—tearing the door of her bedroom off the hinges—finds her. She is petrified by weight of that memory. She remembers the two pops that followed, loud and bright in the darkness, the thick smell of blood and the high pitch of drunken cursing, and Mickey standing there, in the hallway, looming over him, silently telling him to go or else. Tap tap tap tap tap.

“You... you ran into... someone?” she asks again, hesitantly, jaw clenched, slowly gravitating closer towards her older brother. He must have guessed what she was thinking because he added quickly with a dismissive wave of hands.

“Nah Mands, not him. Don’t worry. Haven’t seen that bastard in months. He might be dead for fucks sake. Settle down, it’s fine. You’re fine.” 

Mandy relaxes, swaying in the middle of the empty dinning room. She stands there for a second, in shock, realizing that relief should have washed over both of them by now, but it doesn’t. Mickey is still holding on to the tension, like a man haunted by ghosts. She thinks that if ghosts are coming for her brother, then they might as well take her too. 

In an attempt to lighten the mood, she jokes:

“So what did you run into? A Dick?” 

Mandy always calls her brother’s “special friends” Dick, regardless of their actual name. Because, let’s face it, that’s all they have that Mickey seems interested in. 

When this fails to register amusement, Mandy presses:

“C’mon stud, don’t be shy. Tell me all about your dick-diving adventures. Fuck knows I am bored as hell in this shithole. C’mon big bro, entertain me.”

The tapping returns. Oh a sore spot? Mickey pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes tightly, a surefire sign of exasperation.

“Jesus fucking Christ Mandy, I didn’t fuck him. Can you drop it already?” 

Caught up in the ever-amusing game of taunting her older brother, Mandy allows herself to step closer to his booth, singsonging:

“Well that’s a first! Why would you pass on a perfectly fine cock? Afraid of falling in luuuuv?”

“No,” he answers coolly and matter-of-fact, perhaps too evenly, like an accountant explaining simple math to a child. “No, I didn’t fuck him because I don’t love him anymore.” Suddenly he is looking straight at her, his eyebrows drawn up, his blue eyes hard and tired, a twenty-four-year-old-going-on-forty-five. “Are you happy now?!” 

The opposite of happy, Mandy feels her heart drop because now she gets it. He has finally seen Ian. Honestly, it was to be expected. Mandy had decided not to mention it, but she had seen Ian running around the neighborhood before, in evenings and late nights, when she was readying herself for work. It had began shortly after Mickey returned home. In the beginning she thought Ian was working up the nerve to show up at their door and come after her brother. So Mandy stilled and braced herself for trouble. But when the months ticked by and it became clear that Ian was not coming a-knocking, it seemed less likely that she would tell Mickey about Ian’s running ventures. Disappointment descended upon her too, making her morose about all Ian-related things: she realized that he wasn’t coming for Mickey but that meant he wasn’t coming for her either. She had always felt that when Ian became Mickey’s she had somehow lost him. Yet that was a complicated thought because becoming Mickey’s coincided with becoming ill, and after that Mandy was sure, sadly and completely, that they all had lost Ian—Ian included. 

She tiptoes, slowly backing away into the jukebox. Elf Face must have heard the rise in Mickey’s voice because she popped out of the kitchen only to turn on her heels and waltz right back in. Mandy doesn’t know what to say now that her brother is breathing erratically, staring at the rain fall outside the window. She can hear the menace brewing, his temper flaring and screeching close to derailing. She just wants to run the hell out of there but does her best to steel herself and steam ahead.

“How did he look? Does he seem to be doing better?” 

“How the fuck should I know?! I am not his fucking keeper!” he hisses, but it’s sadness more than anger that comes out in his words. “No, I guess not...he looked, I don’t know...tired? Alone? Fuck. Yeah, maybe that. He looked fucking lonely.”

Mandy nods silently. She’s seen Ian running. He runs like a desperate man being chased down by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The first time she caught a glimpse of his red mop jogging down the street, she was excited, even sprinted to the door to wave him in. But then she heard his thumping pace and his frenetic breathing, and she stopped dead on her tracks, her hand still on the door handle. That was trouble if she had ever seen some. So she veered clear away and waited Ian out, watching his bouncing frame disappear under the El overpass. 

How does that famous quote go? “Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.” Yeah, there you go. She really doesn’t want to get sucked into any of this. Mickey and Ian’s relationship is one of those dark rooms that if you enter, you are guaranteed to forget where the exit door is; you’ll never find your way out and you’ll never stop feeling for it. That’s in part why she bailed to Indiana years ago. Not to escape the two boys but to escape how she felt around them when they were together. They obliterated the world. They made her feel invisible in a way only unloved people can feel—poignantly, needfully, hopelessly. But fate had a funny way of foiling the best laid out plans (hers wasn’t one of these anyway). She has now come to think of the thirty months she spent in Marion, Indiana as a kind of figurative prison, one that paralleled her brother’s real incarceration in Cook County and Ian’s string of hospitalizations in Hyde Park. They all had done time, one way or another, separately and yet connected. 

Fuck, there she goes again, waxing on poetically. If someone would have told her teen self that she’d spend most of her adult life with the nose on a book, trying to find quotes to make sense of her life, Mandy would have sucker-punched the daylights out of that imbecile. But here she is now, in college, reading for pleasure as for credit. It had all started once Molly sent her that first letter years ago. Years ago she had come back home to find the tiny piece of mail crumpled behind the Milkovich door, tangled with unpaid bills and faded circulars. Molly had been adopted by a couple living out in Highland Park, a suburb not too far from the South Side but considerably wealthier. They would never come around to meet, so Molly began mailing Mandy her favorite books, kids’ classics like "The Velveteen Rabbit" or "Charlotte’s Web." Soon enough they had a homegrown book-swap underway. Every night, Mandy made sure she put aside a dollar from the tip jar so she could buy postage to mail another used book. For a while she had dreaded Molly would grow up and start reading those annoying gossipy girly books. But she never did. Now at sixteen, Molly trudged through Turgenev and Tolstoy, puzzling over gender inequalities in 19th-century Russia. The last book by that guy was so damn heavy it cost Mandy a whole extra dollar to mail it across the city. It had been worth it though. That was a mighty quotable doorstopper. 

Mickey’s clinking his glass with a knife coaxes Mandy back to the moment at hand. She grunts but forces herself to sit down across her cagey brother. She waits a minute before whispering as steadily and soothingly as she can:

“It’s okay, you know? If you still love him?”

His laughter is strangled, humorless.

“No Mands, it’s really not.”

Yeah, maybe it’s not. What good did it ever do to her to hold on to Lip? She still thinks of him, still pillages for information whenever she goes over to help Debbie with the kids. She saw him twice since she returned from Indiana, once dropping Liam off and another time bringing Christmas gifts into the house. He wore his hair slicked back and his leather shoes squeaked on the pavement. His car looked shiny and clean as if it had just rolled out of the lot. There was a woman in the car with him the last time. She had full, curly hair, gold sunglasses, and manicured nails. She did not come out of the car to help Debbie carry the presents in. Mandy imagines these are the uppity types Ian has to deal with on the regular. No wonder the guy feels lonely. Mandy feels lonely too although she has met nice guys at community college. They open the door for her and offer to buy her dinner, but she can never feel grounded around them. She always wonders what they would do if they knew of Indiana, of Terry, of the body rotting in a ravine somewhere on the Ohio border. If they would still bring her flowers and pet her hair. 

Tap tap tap.

“Did you want to?” she asks impulsively, without measuring the implications of her question. 

“Wanted what?”

“To fuck him.” 

“Lord almighty, Mandy!? Really? That again? Does it matter?”

“Yeah. Yeah kinda. It kinda matters.”

And there it is, her older brother, older by ten months only, a premature baby, small but tough, and always, always serious about things that matter. He straightens up in his seat and cocks his head, turning the question in his mind. 

“No, I don’t think so. It’s different now, Mands. I couldn’t fuck him. Not like this. I’m not like you.” 

“What the hell does _that_ mean?” 

“It means, I couldn’t do what you did with Lip. That’s all. If it’s over it’s over, let it go. Kick it like a bad habit.” He takes a deep breath, plays with his straw. Then, relenting, adds what sounds like a defeated afterthought: “Plus he’s hurting, Mandy. I couldn’t do that again. I’d end up marrying the guy.”

She laughs at that. It sounds about right. He would. Damn Peter Pan fairy, he would chase that one emotion to the deep end without ever looking back. 

And Ian. Love-hungry Ian would let him do it. Mandy knows this because she too is one of the ravenous prowlers—that’s what drove her to Ian in the first place. She could hear the low rumbling in his belly matching her own. 

“So you’re good?”

“Hmm, yeah, I’m good,” Mickey answers without faltering, but Mandy can hear the jingle of uncertainty under his breath. She is vaguely aware of being thankful for having less absolute emotions, for being able to block the noise of things lost with a relieving litany of taps taps taps. 

She gets up and slides next to her Irish twin, crowding him out. Mickey shifts and pushes at her, annoyed like when they were kids fighting for room in the couch.

“Oh well, his loss,” she muses. “He’s never gonna find a dick as loyal as yours.”

Mickey chuckles at the comment, but nods vigorously in agreement. 

“You got that right. They don’t make them like this in the ivy tower.” He fidgets and Mandy can tell her brother is jonesing for a smoke. Or is it a whiskey shot? “He still looks good though,” he tags on breezily, “broken up and all.”

Mandy cackles rudely, pulling at the strings of her apron.

“Famous last words, brother. Famous last words.”

She throws the frayed apron across the booth but it lands on the floor.

“Wwow wow, what are you doing there, clumsy hands?”

“You know, I think I had enough of standing around this empty joint pretending to be a waitress. I am hungry. You wanna eat something? I am paying.”

Mickey’s highbrows shoot up, amused. 

“You paying? Oh big spender! Are you gonna wine me and dine me before riffling through my wallet? I should tell you in advance that you won’t find much there but one-dollar bills and a Chevron rewards card.”

“Oh man, did Ian take all your money?” The joke might have been too much, she’s not sure. She just desperately wants to dispel the halo of sadness curling around their voices. 

“Nah, nothing like that,” Mickey replies quietly. He starts tugging at his fingers, enumerating. “My heart, eight something years, my dignity once or twice, maybe a coupe of good shirts...and my favorite hoodie. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that fucker took my grey hoodie. I bet he’s running laps right now in the pouring rain in that damn hoodie! And it won’t even fit him right! I mean, it barely covered his wrists, it drove me nuts! And he did it all the fucking time too. Said it was broken-in and cozy or some crazy shit like that. Why the fuck do you take another grown-ass man’s clothes if they don’t fit you!? Why would you even want to have that on you, I say? Why?! The guy is nuts, I tell you, fucking certifiable!”

Mandy mock-pats her brother on the back. His eyes are wide with laughter but sprinkled with tears.

“Hey why don’t you tell us how you really feel about it? Want me to get Elf Face out here so you can have a larger audience? There might be a short cook hiding somewhere in the back too if you want a bigger party. I can go check!”

“Well, it would be the best thing to happen to this place in years!”

“For real, my brother, for real,” Mandy hums while raising her hand and shouting:

“Yo, Elf Face, come on out and bring my brother the Big Daddy steak that we’ve been hiding in the back of the freezer for a year! We’re going on a date here!”

A shadow passes over Mickey’s face then, as if a painful memory had paid him an unexpected visit. He glances away, blankly, his eyes suddenly gone glassy. It makes Mandy’s heart clench. Before noticing it, she is doing something they only did once in their adult lives: she slips her hand under the table and covers his briefly, just enough for a quick squeeze. It conjures memories of the long ride back in the suffocating Indiana heat, their hands flickering close together as Mickey gripped the steering wheel so forcefully his bloodied knuckles turned cadaverous white. He pulls his hand away and slaps it on the table, fully open. To Mandy’s relief, his voice seems to have regained some of its regular acerbic spunk. 

Mickey hollers at the deserted counter:

“Where’s my damn steak? Do I have to go back there and carve the fucking thing off a cow myself? C’mon lazy feet, let’s get this show on the road!”

Mandy smiles, feeling the secret void inside her brighten up a little.


	4. At The Edge of the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last one--epilogue of some sorts. Both Mickey's and Ian's POV. 
> 
> "The sun is almost through the clouds of what will be an ordinary grey day. There’s a taste of snow in the crisp air. There is a stillness inside Mickey he can’t account for. He wonders if this is what it feels like to stop running, to turn your motor down low and just let it idle for a minute. If idling, not running, feels like this, the taste of crisp, unspoiled snow. Ian is heavy on his arm and shoulder, breathing steadily against his chest. Like a lost child, a found puppy, something tender and vulnerable and precious. Something you give up because you don’t know how to keep."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everybody who read, commented, etc. I needed to write this so I could move on, and you were a big part of getting me that closure. I'm off now but hugs to all the one who'll brave S6.
> 
> Happy Holidays!

“The world is a small place,” adults tell children, and children believe them. Because how could it not be small? There’s a bed and there’s a house in a yard, and a straight path to school and maybe an ice-cream shop or a friend’s home in the middle of the familiar circumference. The Milkovich and the Gallagher siblings always thought of their world as small, a self-contained universe, a galaxy edged by forbidden streets and functional alleyways, the elevated train opening it upwards but not so much lengthwise. Of them all, only Mickey had repeatedly gone out of the borders, pushing his body out and out again into the sun-bleached Arizona plaines, the icy Minnesota lakes. But he always came back, always found himself at his childhood home after months-long, one week, a single day away. The world had never seemed a smaller place though, than when he walked his sister home that night after her eight-hour shift, through the drizzling Chicago fog and the impending winter morning, to find Ian Gallagher sitting on the Milkovich walkup, his long legs outstretched on the stairs, the smoke from his cigarette mixing with the mist from his breath. 

Through the crescendo of his heartbeat, Mickey could hear himself muttering “what the fuck?,” and Mandy must have quickened her step because he suddenly found himself being pulled back, extending the distance between his body and the barely lit house. Tiredness rains down on him hard and relentless, the exorbitance of the last twenty-four hours seeming impossibly full and punishing. Could this ever end? This would never end, would it? “This” being what exactly Mickey was unable to articulate. It felt depthless and dark like a night without sleep, a mountain road without street-lamps. It felt hopeless, a nightmare he could never wake up from, a bunker without doors or windows. Ian Gallagher was a black hole in an otherwise possibly limitless universe. Why would he have to be doomed to fall into it over and over again? Fuck, he isn’t. He isn’t, he isn’t, his heart thumps as he picks up speed and takes wide, decisive strides towards his front yard, overcoming Mandy who has stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes look wild under the black bangs. Her lips are tightened into a tense line. She drums her red fingernails on the banister, as if impatiently waiting for someone to say something, for the world to stop contracting and expand again. Mickey deliberately focuses on his sister as he walks by, refusing to acknowledge the redhead until he is upon him. The way he lounges there, impassive, absolute, stirs an anger Mickey thought had thawed with the warm meal, with the comfortable silence he had just shared with his sister. With years of distance, of rubbing memories off with your fingers until all that it’s left is the ghost of absence, that vague shape you used to call love. 

Alright then, knives out.

What the fuck? What the fuck is he doing here? What the fuck with dredging all this shit up TWICE in the same fucking night? _What the fuck!_ He is spatting it out loud before he can stop it, he is screaming it in a quiet hiss that sounds menacing enough to send Mandy up a step. There is a faint stiffening of the other man’s body—Mickey refuses to think of him by name now; right now, in the cloud that storms up inside him, that would be murder. In the end, the redhead merely nods and stomps the cigarette under his boot. Then he is looking up at Mandy, and saying in what resembles the smallest voice a human could produce: “Hey you. Hey, I missed you.” 

Mandy shifts in her feet, her heart suddenly leaping up and up and up, and she can feel the corners of her mouth, the pit in her stomach, rise up and up and up, and before she can catch herself she is reaching down and patting Ian’s head, feeling the damp of the rain and the sweat from the run oozing off his messy red hair, and in that moment, that minuscule moment before she pulled her hand away and sprinted into the house, Mandy senses that maybe it had always been him that she loved, the one she secretly wanted to run away with into a world of romance and safety, not any other but Ian, the young Ian, this Ian, Mickey’s Ian. She runs inside abruptly, going around the house locking all the doors standing between herself and the red-haired man on the stairs. 

The noise of the door slamming cues Mickey into a primitive emotion he didn’t know still lived inside him. It’s best experienced as a red-hot frenzy wrapped in frustration and powerlessness, the second-cousin of a flight-or-fight instinct. He could kill someone when he is in the throes of it as much as he could fuck them. He can’t tell the difference anymore; he is too old, too worn, too untrained to know what to do with this kind of intensity. The only thing Mickey knows for sure is that if that ghost of a man left, if only he left and never came back, he’d be safe—his world would shrink into a manageable size again. 

Ian can’t look up. Not yet. His eyes are fixed in a point beyond the clearing horizon. He is thinking of the stars and how quickly they disappear once the sun peeks in, of the pain spreading dully through his leg and the swelling growing in his sprained ankle. He is thinking of Mandy and her touch, kind, familiar, almost, almost like Mickey’s when he tucked his hair hours ago. He thinks of Mickey’s smell, vibrant like a living thing, now that he has come closer. He thinks that Mickey’s hand is nigh enough that he can almost distinguish his birthmark and the pale freckles that comprise it. He thinks of brushing his thumb over that patch of skin. But Ian does nothing of the sort. Instead, he says brightly, holding the smashed cigarette up: 

“You know, I kinda quit these. I keep one hidden in my socks, though, just in case.” He rolls his pants up, points to the secret spot. “Don’t tell Lip,” he adds quickly, looking down. “He’d flip.” 

Mickey’s brain is racing now, hurting with the fast shifting of its gears. How the hell could he tell Lip if he hasn’t seen the smug fuck for years now? And what does that matter? Mickey wonders if the guy is off his meds again, if that explains the eerie immobility, his monotone voice, his lovely sad eyes. Mickey is also pretty sure he saw a garish bruise on the other man’s ankle. Did he break his fucking foot on my doorstep so he can’t leave? Is he never going to leave now? No. No. Fuck that. This can’t be happening. Not again. Panic grips him but Mickey shakes the thought away, shakes himself away from thinking by repeating, louder this time, “Why the fuck are you here?”

Ian, quietly, sighing as if relenting, shrugs without looking up: “You’re here.” 

“What the hell does that mean?,” Mickey spits hotly, his head spinning, his muscles clutching, rearing for a fight. And Ian is left wondering if they are stuck repeating a set number of lines for all eternity, going back and forth role-reversing and role-playing at not loving each other until both of them are dead. The utter endlessness of that possibility makes Ian want to crawl up in a ball and sleep forever. Or spring up and run to the edge of the world. But he doesn’t. Instead he opens his hands and stretches them up, the kind of gesture a small kid would make when he needs help getting on his feet. If Mickey sees this form of surrender, the only form of apology Ian has left, he doesn’t show. He has climbed the stairs two at the time, and is now standing behind Ian on the porch, pacing back and forth. The sound of his footsteps makes Ian drowsy, makes his realize how much of a toll all that running took on him. If Mickey stopped, he could finally let himself fall asleep. But Mickey doesn’t stop.

He paces because he can’t sit. If he sits, there might be no turning back, it might be too much like calling a ghost’s name into a mirror; you can’t send them back after you sought them out. His eyes dart around uncomfortably, his coat fidgets off his back at the thought of Ian barely covered in his paper-thin uniform, hair drenched, neck bare, ankle busted, he must be freezing in the 20 degrees weather. Besting him, Mickey’s brain goes back to that moment hours ago when he touched Ian’s neck, and how clammy he felt, a hint of fever blossoming under the fair skin. Huddled and from his canted angled, Ian looks like a sick child, cold and vulnerable. Mickey struggles to keep his coat on by thinking of snowy fields, foggy windows, frozen lakes, anything to make himself attached to its warmth.

He finds his voice at last. He asks, detached, businesslike, as much as an orderly filing paperwork as he can muster:

“So you okay? Should I get you ice or something?”

There’s a smile at the tip of Ian’s lips that is afraid of coming out. Ian fears it might be his last smile, so he saves it. 

“I am alright. I sprained my ankle when I was running, that’s all.” He feels the urge to tell Mickey that it’s not all, that actually he stopped taking his pills weeks ago, that he does that sometimes—stupidly, childishly—in a desperate attempt to prove that it’s still him down there, on the other side, under water, under the voices, the blanket of sadness. Ian wants to tell him of other things too, happier, easier things, like how he learnt to bake snickerdoodle cookies from scratch with Debbie’s kids, how he’s won marathons around campus that come with small cash prizes and little golden trophies he keeps in a shelf inside his closet in Lip’s house. That sometimes he takes them all out and lines them up on the floor and just looks at them for what seems a very long time. 

But Ian doesn’t share any of this because he is afraid Mickey might not listen, not really; he might not care, not anymore. For a while, meeting men who didn’t ask questions filled Ian with relief and confidence. Now the feeling of not being known has grown lonely, a heavy stone inside his chest waiting to be found out and cast away. He stopped running, he chose him. He can’t afford to lose him, not now, not like this, not again. It’s that simple. So Ian quips sunnily: “It’s not too bad. I called Tony and he helped me up. He gave me painkillers too. Says I should lay off my leg for a while.”

“Tony? Chicago’s finest Tony?”

“Yeah, Fiona married him three years ago.” A small smile at the ironical smallness of their world creeps into Ian’s voice. “You didn’t know?” And then, somewhat embarrassed at his own oversight, “No, I guess you wouldn’t know, being away and all...yeah...he’s a paramedic now, Tony. He’s nice. They live in Lake Forest with Liam. I don’t go there much.” Ian realizes the pressure in his speech, the nervous blabber, a valve he cannot control when he is around Mickey. (This is new. Is it new? It’s new). He pinches his nose, taps his injured foot, makes himself stop with the rush of pain. Yet at the same time, his mouth is beginning to form a question, unsure of what exactly it’s trying to know, but decided to get at it:

“Did you?”

“Did I what?” It’s the second time that night someone presses him with obtuse, loaded questions. Mickey’s patience is wearing thin. 

“Did you...you know, get married...” A beat. “Again, I mean...not to a woman.”

“Not to a woman? What the fuck Gallagher? Smooth, very smooth.” It’s the laughter again, the limpidity of that laughter, that hits Ian the hardest. How many light-years away from the mumbled chuckles, the brisk smiles they used to share.

Mickey is half laughing still, open and hearty, when he replies: “If there’s no ring on your finger then it doesn’t look like I did, does it?” 

Ian nods, a speck of warm hope swimming in an ocean of bitter regret.

“So...” he begins, cautiously choosing his words, but Mickey shuts him down almost immediately. 

“Don’t get cocky, Gallagher. It means nothing.” Mickey’s mind floods with memories of breezy summer nights and drafty stiff mattresses, of soft hands and rough knuckles running up and down his thighs. Then he adds, bravely, sternly: “There were others.”

“Others?” Mickey catches the indignation in his voice before Ian can try to conceal it. There’s feeling in there, a hot nerve, an exposed wire, two lines attached across time and flesh. But still Mickey pushes it back. I’m not ready, he tells himself, I’m not ready for the long way down that rabbit hole. I worked too hard to get out of it once already. He hears himself saying:

“Sure. I didn’t sign my dick off to you when you dumped me, did I?”

The words should be playful but are filled with hurt. Ian can hear it ringing through the silence that follows. Mickey can hear it in his own gut, jingling amidst something else, something sharper, a brighter noise. Against his better judgment, Mickey finds himself sitting down next to Ian, pulling a cigarettes out of his pocket, lighting it slowly. Here we are, he says to himself. Here we are again. At the edge of the fucking world. Definitely not the night to start quitting.

“No. No, I guess you didn’t.”

Mickey pulls on his cigarette, mulling over the past. Morning is coming fast, you can tell by the pinks and whites marring the horizon. The exhaustion of that infinite day finally hits him when he sits down, makes his whole body reel. He can’t keep up the angry banter any longer. He asks with what, to him, is disarmed interest, a lukewarm form of surrender:

“What do you want Gallagher? Really.”

“Why, I want you Mick,” Ian replies immediately, not an eyelash bat. When that pebble of an answer, pure and puerile, earns him a sad chuckle and a slight shake of the head, Ian soldiers on. “Well, I want us, me, like I remember it. I want to be able to call and talk to you, to go by your house without having my heart in my throat. I want to hang out and go out for food—together. I want to stop running in circles. I want you to be my ICE...”

“Hold on, _your ICE_ ...?! You telling me you sat your frozen ass on my porch for eight hours because you want me to be your emergency contact? Are you high on something right now?” 

Additional words elude him. Ian thought he was doing a good job at explaining things he can only explain with small, meaningful expressions like “I love you,” “I want you,” “I’m sorry.” But he tried all of those before; they didn’t work. Maybe nothing will. Maybe the wound is too deep, the scar too old. 

Or maybe he should tell him of the time he visited Pittsburgh two years ago, and how every time he went outside he couldn’t stop thinking of Mickey because the city smelled just like him: wet steel and fallen leaves, ash and thunder. But maybe that’s not something you can tell another person. Maybe it’s like telling people you haven’t seen in years that you love them more now than ever before, because you’ve lived with their memory for so long, you came to know them better, to cherish them dearer. But maybe that’s mad talk, maybe that would only make matters worse; he can’t tell for sure. So Ian says nothing.

“Listen, I can’t do it alright? Not again. Can you understand that?” Mickey’s voice is flat, inflexible, an arrow on a straightforward path. 

Ian can and can’t. Or won’t.

“It’s because I’m sick? Because I’m...” 

“No...why the fuck would you...no, it’s not because you’re sick.” An impatience, a resolution. “No. It’s because I don’t...”

“Yeah, yeah, I know...” Ian cuts him off abruptly (don’t say it, please don’t say it). “Fine. Friends then? What about if I call you some time? You said you drive for a living, right? I bet it gets boring in those long runs. I can call you, keep you company. You can tell me about the places you see, the people you meet...” Ian trails off, leaving the image of Mickey meeting strangers rest somewhere in the air between them, unformed, unreal.

Yeah but what will happen when he doesn't feel like calling anymore? No, Mickey can’t imagine it, sitting in his truck surrounded by all that empty silence. It would be unbearable, he’d have to walk away. No, he can’t gamble, can’t risk to lose all that he gained. 

So he answers: “Nah man, I ain’t much of a talker.”

“Well, I am. I can be. If you let me.”

Ian’s voice, the bare honesty of it, strips something inside Mickey. He lifts his chin from his knees and, for the first time since they let go of each other, he stares at Ian. Full on, no pretenses, no blinking, no messing around. Fuck it. Let’s go, let’s see this through. I am not a coward, not anymore. Maybe all I’ll see is the memory of the guy I loved. Maybe there’s nothing there but a ghost. I killed my share of ghosts before. Bring it on, I can do it again. Maybe the fear is all in my head. He’s just a boy after all. He’s just a boy I used to know, a boy I used to fuck. I fucked others, many, after him, before him. He’s but a blimp in a whole galaxy, right? And so what if I still want to fuck him? It doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t have to mean anything if I don’t want to, don’t let it. Just look at him. He’s just a kid. Look. He’s just a sick kid. 

Ian can feel himself under scrutiny. Instinctively panic bubbles inside him because he doesn’t know what can be read in his skin, he doesn’t know how much Mickey can intuit from the wrinkles around his eyes, the sleepless nights etched in his forehead, second-guessing his choices, his brain, his life, the blisters in his hands from gripping the broom, the hose, the steering wheel too tightly, the dryness in his lips from biting away the feelings he can’t control. He tries to stare back, to finally wait Mickey out, to let him have it, let him have him, let him have it all, on his own terms—but it’s hard, and again Ian is thankful for his sprained ankle or he would have bolted from under Mickey’s unflinching gaze in five seconds flat. 

Mickey’s neck hurts from the excessive force he is putting on his muscles not to look away. He breathes in, brings the half-dead smoke to his lips. So that’s it. Ian can hear the buzzing tension passing between them. He can’t read Mickey’s half-turned face though. He can’t do anything anymore actually and that, somehow, brings him a sense of peace. He lets a sigh out. 

Mickey feels queasy, as if the walls of an already small room had closed in on him, cutting off all oxygen. He is invaded by a feeling he didn’t know before. Before, to look at Ian was to have his veins pump, pop, throb, burn, all at once. He wanted him as much as he wanted to live, with a desperate, mad hunger that was made up of lust and fear. To lose him was to stop breathing. To have him was to drown. That seemed gone now, mostly anyway. Mickey couldn’t grasp exactly what came to replace that catastrophe of feelings, but it was something else altogether, clear, transparent even, lean and muscular, and not at all scary. Perhaps because of that foreign quietness it was all the more frightening. Mickey hadn’t encountered this before, hadn’t heard people describe it, not even whores or married people. He is frankly at a loss. Then, precipitously, it dawns on him: he doesn’t want to fuck Ian Gallagher. He wants to keep him. Forever too, probably.

Oh fuck no. Not that. Anything but that. 

The jack is out of the box! The jack is out of the box!, Terry used to howl when he caught his kids in a lie. Mickey hates that saying. Yet he can’t stop running it in his head, here, now. _The fucking jack is so out of its proverbial fucking box!_

Like a puppet on a string, Mickey suddenly stands upright, backing off into the front door. It all happens so quickly that Ian jumps up a little too, forgetting his hurt ankle. He groans, less from the physical injury and more from the crushing certainty that Mickey is at long last truly leaving—leaving the scene, leaving the moment, leaving him. 

Without control over his body, arms flailing forward, Ian loses his footing and starts falling down. He can feel his head swirling, loosing time. He braces himself for another mild concussion, for flesh meeting the floor for the second time that night (why not? repetition seems fitting. it’s what we do, right? round and round around the Rosie, we all fall down). 

Only Mickey catches him this time, steadying him—one hand on the shoulder, another on the hip—so that for one full second they are awkwardly hugging. That is until Mickey pushes Ian back onto the stairs, harshly, a horrified grimace clouding his face as if he had seen death dancing in Ian’s eyes. 

That’s it. Again. This is it. Forever. I lost him. No Pittsburgh story can ever fix this.

The smile Ian had been saving for Mickey dies in his throat.

“Ay, you should call your brother now, alright? Let him know you’re here?” Mickey’s voice is flustered, rushed, almost unkind.

“Yeah,” Ian answers, running a hand over his face, defeated, exhausted, ready to slip away. “Yeah okay.”

“You got insurance for that?”

“What?” Ian asks confusedly, leaning his head against the railing, drifting off. Bluntly Mickey points at Ian’s outstretched leg. “Oh yeah. Yeah, it’ll be fine.”

On the landing, Mickey walks in small and smaller circles, his heart furling and unfurling like a mechanical toy. Damn, it always has to be _his_ way. He shows up whenever he wants, leaves whenever he feel like, asks for things, demands them, pulls them out without permission but always with a strange measure of kindness that leaves Mickey positively bewildered. Every time. _Every single fucking time._ If the world is vast and the universe endless, then why the fuck am I condemned to running around in circles with him? This got to stop. I can stop it. I can make it move forward. 

As the thought forms in his head, smoky but energizing, Mickey is hammering on Ian’s shoulder, telling him, Gallagher, it’s time to go, you need to call your brother, get that foot checked out by a doctor, and leave me the fuck alone once and for all. Gallagher, come on. When Ian doesn’t respond something flutters inside Mickey, fast and frantic, and for what stretches for too long of a minute, he is shaking him, calling his name, first brusquely, then softer and quieter, _Ian, Ian, Ian_ , as if making your voice smaller could work miracles and raise the dead. Mickey finds himself on his knees, his hand hovering over Ian’s neck, stiltedly trying to find a pulse, a heartbeat, anything stirring under the muggy skin.

He’s burning up but he’s alive. Passed out cold. Mickey turns that expression in his head as he lets out a painful breath he didn’t know he was holding. He is cold, too cold. Why can’t he just take care of himself like a normal human being, just grab a fucking jacket for Christ’s sake if you are going to be out in the freezing rain for a whole fucking night. How hard is that? Fucking hard apparently. There’s a vague fear, a suspicion, that maybe Ian is fishing for a tragedy, that he wants to run himself ragged until his body just gives up and then it’s not on him anymore, if it happens, if he fades, if he burns out like a shooting star. But that is none of his business right?, not anymore. He’s not his keeper. 

Still here is Ian, sick and busted and out-cold and god-knows what else, on his watch. Jesus, now what? Mickey knows he can’t bring him inside. If he does, it will be history repeating itself and Mickey is not going to allow that. No siree. The world gotta be bigger than a loop, history gotta be more expansive that one single chapter whose pages change but the story stays the same. No, that’s madness. He’s not mad. He’s tired. He’s underslept, but he’s not mad. Ian Gallagher is not sleeping in his bed—not again, not tonight, not ever. At least that little he should be able to control.

His coat comes off easily, almost with relief; Mickey realizes he’d been itching to rip it off since he stepped into his yard. Gingerly, he wraps the thick fabric around Ian’s arms, neck, chin, back, making sure no patch of skin is left open to the merciless gale. He sleeps so soundly against the railing that Mickey can’t avoid conjuring up the fifteen-year-old boy he used to be, a child at ease, bubbly, and free. Since he’s already sitting down, Mickey decides to lit up a cigarette. There’s only two left in his pack, so what the hell, if there’s ever a time for it, this is it. Throwing caution at the wind, Mickey lights both cigarettes at the same time, stacks them together and smokes them in unison. For a moment he is gazing out into the open road, brightening up with the dawning light, clean and brand-new like all mornings tend to be—filled with promise. He expected to be cold without his jacket, but Ian’s warmth seems to fill up the whole space around him, like a small star, a sun being kind to a particularly minuscule planet. Mickey is remotely aware that he is waiting out a feeling that refuses to stand down. It’s yet another unnameable feeling in a long laundry-list of feelings he can’t afford to feel anymore. 

Perhaps because of that, of the sheer amount of hours he’s been up without any sleep or the sheer amount of years he’s been denying himself the pleasures of straying, he lets himself slip under the coat and reach for Ian’s sleeping body, leaning in closer and closer until he is barely a breath away from his ear, ghosting over his neck, able to trace every vein snaking under that skin he knows it’s warm and moist with fever. He can smell him, smell the woodsiness from the rain in his hair, the sweat on his hairline, and more strangely, he can smell himself on Ian’s skin, traces of his cologne whiffing from the jacket that envelops them both. It’s so stunningly intimate, to smell himself on Ian, that it takes Mickey aback for a second. Yet, on the same beat, he’s back on track to get what he came for. He’s nearing Ian’s ear, measuring his words meticulously, savoring the triumphant anticipation of the moment, until he whispers in one curt breath: “Fuck. You.”

There’s no perceptible reaction from Ian, though Mickey thinks he noticed him shiver as he pulled away. The satisfaction of the gesture begins to fade almost immediately, but Mickey holds on to it stubbornly as he goes back to his smokes. And then, unexpectedly, Ian turns on his side and rests his head on Mickey’s shoulder. No warning, no request, again, even in his sleep. Shock immobilizes him momentarily though Mickey is struck by the urgency to flight, or maybe fight. Push him off. Do it now before it’s too late. He’s probably awake anyway, the cunning fucker. _Push. him. off._

In dreams, Ian is falling, grasping at stars that spin too rapidly out of reach, as he tumbles down a long, narrow rabbit hole, down through the lightless stratosphere. In waking life, Mickey can feel Ian’s fingers dig into his flesh, steeping bruises along his right shoulder and forearm. Mickey will tell himself later that he couldn’t help it, that it couldn’t be helped. As he shifts his weight under the large coat and brings Ian closer into the crook of his neck; as he hoists his arm under Ian’s ribcage and rocks him gently against his chest, feeling the grip on his forearm relent; as Ian’s head slips under his chin and he runs his hand up and down the small of Ian’s back, vaguely humming a tuneless melody—as he does all of this Mickey keeps repeating to himself, this couldn’t be helped, I couldn’t help it, I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t help it. It was too late to be helped. 

The sun is almost through the clouds of what will be an ordinary grey day. There’s a taste of snow in the crisp air. There is a stillness inside Mickey he can’t account for. He wonders if this is what it feels like to stop running, to turn your motor down low and just let it idle for a minute. If idling, not running, feels like this, the taste of crisp, unspoiled snow. Ian is heavy on his arm and shoulder, breathing steadily against his chest. Like a lost child, a found puppy, something tender and vulnerable and precious. Something you give up because you don’t know how to keep. 

Almost mindlessly, he finds himself running fingers through red hair until the rhythm of the movement lulls him to sleep. Drifting into semiconsciousness, Mickey can sense the unclenching of a stiffness, the cracking of a padlock he was not aware he still carried around inside. It’s almost physical that sensation of release. He can hear his breathing hitch, punctuated by his hands stroking Ian’s side—first under the big winter coat, then under the damp uniform—pulling at slippery buttons, fumbling for familiar crevices, feeling for warm swatches of skin, hungrily burying his nose in red hair, jaw, neck, nape, nudging the underside of Ian’s chin, holding him tighter, breathing him in, chasing down the heady unwinding taking place inside some secret part of himself, the thick current of abandonment, of want, of being peaceful but sharply present, there, right there, not somewhere else fighting ghosts, nursing battle wounds, policing borders. He’s here. He is right here and it’s the smallest world Mickey ever saw, all but the size of two bodies, and it’s perfect. 

The sound of floorboards creaking behind him startles Mickey out of that dangerous limbo, the syrupy twilight between awareness and dream. He straightens up with a jerk, his hands splaying besides him clumsily. Ian’s still asleep on his shoulder, hands draped on his lap, forehead pressed against his collarbone. Warm, too warm, barely stirring. 

Mickey’s heart is in his mouth, his body shakes and hums as if he was standing at the edge of—what? Crying? Coming? No. It’s something else altogether. 

Mandy’s voice finds him there, subdued and tentative. 

“I called Lip. He said he’d be here in 20 minutes.”

“Yeah, okay, good.” His voice too is small, uncertain, almost sticky. Tiredly, he runs a hand over his face, forcing himself to wake up. 

Hesitant at first, Mandy comes to sit next to him on the stairs. She’s lighting a smoke, staring at the sun rising in front of them. Finally she allows herself to look at Ian.

“He’s pretty banged up huh?”

“Yeah,” Mickey whispers glimpsing down, his voice foreign to his own ears. He can see the naked skin around Ian’s neck, the void where he undid buttons. _Fuck_.

“It’s looking up though?”

“What you mean?”

“He’s smiling.” Mandy gestures to Ian with her cigarette. “You see? He’s smiling in his sleep.”

Mickey glances away, too drained, too estranged for any more words. Mandy passes him her cigarette and they smoke back and forth for a while, basking in the chill of the newborn morning, both immersed in contemplative silence. 

“We are keeping him, aren’t we?” Mandy murmurs at long last, any emotion opaque, her eyes unmoving, just a streamlined observation.

Mickey pulls on the dying smoke, lets it soak every corner of his lungs, then tosses it into the barren yard. “Maybe?” he replies, gently clasping the clammy hand nestled on his lap. Hot fingers slide into his fist, curling their way around, thumbing his palm, making him open up. _He lets it happen._ The hold tightens. He closes his eyes, shivers, swallows, steadies—squeezes back. _He lets it happen._ “Fuck, I don’t know. We’ll see.” 

In the distance the sun cracks the sky open in orange and blue.


End file.
